Intel Reiterates Investment Message, Roadmap

At its annual meeting Thursday, Intel Corp. reiterated its oft-heard mantra that reinvestment will help the technology industry climb out of the recession.

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At its annual meeting Thursday, Intel Corp. reiterated its oft-heard mantra that reinvestment will help the technology industry climb out of the recession.

Traditionally, the semiconductor industry has always been cyclical, following every dip with a surge. Intel chief executive Craig Barrett said the past dip looked more extreme, as the industry went through the equivalent of ten years of change in a single year.

Barrett said Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., holds an $8 billion R&D budget and said it will continue to invest in new manufacturing operations and technologies. "New technology helps you out of a recession it not only gives you investment in new products but also cost reduction," he said.

Intel executives also fired a shotgun round of new details about the company's roadmap. "A very simple premise is that we believe all computers increasingly will have means of communicationsnot just through a telephone line or a networking cable, but move seamlessly through a variety of networks," said Paul Otellini, Intel's president and chief operating officer.

From a product standpoint, that means that Intel will integrate 802.11 wireless functionality onto its next-generation desktop chipsets, most likely using the 802.11a standard Intel has supported. PC333 memory will also be supported, Otellini said.

Intel's 2.4-GHz Pentium 4s will give way to 2.53-GHz chips later this quarter followed by a 3-GHz chip at the end of the year. The Pentium 4 line will also move to a 533-MHz front-side bus. Celerons will also move to the Pentium 4 microarchitecture this quarter, Otellini said. Meanwhile, the Intel 845G chipset--Intel's first desktop chipset with the new graphics corewill ship this quarter with several versions available for the Pentium 4 and Celeron lines. As Intel has said before, Prescott, most likely dubbed the Pentium 5, will ship in the second half of 2003 on a 90-nm (0.09-micron) process.

In notebooks, Intel will move the mobile Pentium 4 to 2-GHz this year before the rearchitected Banias chip rolls out next year. Banias should offer users 25 percent more battery life than the Pentium 4, Otellini said.

Intel also said it had branded the next-generation Itanium processor, McKinley, as "Itanium 2", which is scheduled for volume release in the middle of this year. McKinley will have 3 Mbytes of onboard cache and 220 million transistors. Madison, the followon chip, will contain 500,000 transistors and 6 Mbytes of cache.

While Intel has worked to bring communications capabilities to computers, the company has also taken the opposite route. In PDAs and next-generation mobile phones, the company is working to enhance its Xscale embedded processor lineup with new capabilities. To enable lighter phones with more capabilities, Intel has worked to "stack" flash memory dice, one on top of the other, said Ron Smith, senior vice president and general maanger of Intel's wireless communications and computing group.

In Japan, often seen as the driver for mobile phones, Intel estimates that the flash usage per phone will jump from about 60 Mbits to just under 200 Mbits this year alone, driven by the wave of 3G-like services being deployed by NTT DoCoMo and others. While last year's phones would include 4,000-color displays and simplistic Java applications, Smith said Intel expects an average 2002 Japanese mobile phone will include a 44,000-color display, handle rich Java applications, and display photos and play MP3s.

Intel can currently stack three flash dice on top of another and will sample a four-high stack this year. To integrate further, Intel said it would "fold" an Xscale processor and 128-Mbit flash chip on top of one another, creating a two-high stack. The future, Smith said, will be to integrate the flash memory, logic, and analog communications devices onto a single chip; a chip for 2.5G cell phones with that capability will sample during the second half of 2002.

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